The most important question to ask before making a marketing video…

How do you want your audience to feel after they watch your video?

Economics taught us that supply and demand are driven by rational forces… they’re not.

In marketing, access to the best information will always win out because we will always take the most logical course of action. Not even close…

The most important thing to consider before you start a video project is how do you want your audience to feel. Knowing the answer to this question will determine how you approach the concept for your video, how you develop the storyboard and how you shoot and edit your video.

Don’t worry, you’ll still get to squeeze in a bunch of features and benefits into your video somehow, but if you don’t know how you want the viewer to feel after they’ve watched your video then you’re not likely to leave leave much of an impression.

Humans are basically lazy creatures. We’re risk averse, we’re open to suggestion and we don’t like to think too much if we don’t have to. We’d like to think our rational minds are guiding our behaviours but it’s our subconscious that is in charge. Your conscious mind is just the interface to the world, it exists to rationalize the ‘gut feeling’ decision that you’re already going to make.

The best way to make someone take action is to get them to feel something in relation to your product or service. Surprise, happiness, concern, awe – all of these emotional triggers help the viewer relate to and remember the information they just watched.

Emotional links are the binding agents that lock the information you just viewed into your memory.

You likely can’t explain why you feel a certain way about a product – but you ‘know in your heart’ that it’s something you are interested in.

The goal for any marketing video is, where possible, to align your brand with a feeling. Align the messaging, style and information in the video with something that will resonate viscerally with your audience.

Apple is a master of this strategy. As is Coke… and Nike… and any number of leading businesses who have purposefully chosen to elevate their brands to something more than just features and benefits.

eBay created this web promo around a very simple idea – they wanted to associate their brand with happiness. The sound of the doorbell means ‘something from Ebay just arrived – yippee!!!”

Good marketing doesn’t have to be any more complicated than this.

So the next time you start a video project, before you start brainstorming concepts and building a laundry list of features and benefits ask yourself this simple questions first: